by Hugo Huesca
Princess Tulip was there, along with three spider warriors, their mandibles clicking angrily at the sound of the villagers’ threats and pleading. Close to the spiders were the rest of the villagers, about two dozen of them, armed with farming equipment and other tools, out of which some had fashioned crude spears and blunt weaponry.
“Stick them!” one of the villagers said. “There’s more of us!” Yet no one was willing to make the first move.
Ed had seen something similar once. The mob was trying to garner enough anger to override their fear. One of them saw Ed approach and pointed at him with a bony finger:
“It’s the Dungeon Lord!” the man exclaimed. Ed couldn’t recall his name. The guy had had to remain a captive of the Haunt because he was a drunk who couldn’t keep a secret to save his life.
All the heads, including the spiders, turned to Ed. In what seemed like another lifetime, the attention may have terrified him. Right now, he was too busy to even notice.
“May the Light have mercy!” another man. This one was a devout member of Alita’s Militant Church.
“By the wetlands, Bryne, be a man and fight him!” said a woman with a half-closed eye. She had been left behind on Andreena’s recommendation, on the grounds that the woman loved to spread rumors and start fights. “He’s only one guy!” she goaded the farmer next to her.
Ed’s Evil Eye flared angrily, lighting the villagers’ faces with eldritch green. Ed saw frightened people, taken from their homes, but he also saw the dangerous glint of their improvised weaponry.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked Princess Tulip.
Tulip took a tentative step away from the standing villagers and pointed a hairy leg to the ones webbed to the ground. “A treacherous escape attempt, my Lord.” She hissed with anger. “They waited for nightfall, when we change patrols, and tried to make a break for it. It was only luck we caught them—a nearby batblin patrol warned us. When we ordered them to lay down their weapons, they charged at us. Would’ve killed us, had we not defended ourselves.”
Ed turned to the villagers. “Is this true?”
“True, you ask?” Bryne asked. “True? I’ll tell you what’s true! For a month now, your minions and you, Wright, have told us over and over again how you must keep us prisoners for our own sake! Such nonsense! We aren’t blind, you know. You walk in the company of horned spiders and yet pretend to be on our side! The same spiders that killed Ioan, the same ones that burned our village down! You’ve sweet-talked Kes the Traitor, even Heorghe and the others, but not us! No, I say! We know the likes of you, Dungeon Lord. We know that whatever you hold in store for us is nothing good. That’s what’s true, anyway!”
Cold rage surged through Ed’s veins. “Have you not listened to a word we’ve said? You know how the Inquisition works! Are you idiots trying to get everyone killed?” A wave of fear shook their faces. To Ed, it was nonsensical, another sign that the world had gone insane. There was no reason to be scared of him. He was just a guy.
He realized his Evil Eye was still active. He closed his eyes and willed his temper to ease.
“See?” asked the woman in a whisper. “See? What did I tell you? Even now, he threatens us!” Her eyes were wide, glinting with excitement.
“Aye,” another woman said. “It’s true.” She spat a brownish blob in front of her feet. “Get fucked, Dungeon Lord. We ain’t staying. Unless you’re willing to make us? Go ahead. Prove how good you are. Kill us.”
Three men stepped forth, armed with shovels and sickles. They weren’t Burrova’s best, and definitely not fighters. They had meager attributes, skills unsuited for combat. If a fight broke out, Ed knew he and the spiders would win before he even bothered to rain his drones.
Winning wasn’t the issue, though. He tossed the last of Karmich’s knives at the feet of the nearest farmer. “Cut your friends free before they hurt themselves.” He nodded to the ten webbed shapes. “Go back to your tents. Be reasonable. This is a fight you cannot win.” Goddamn, why do I feel so cold? he wondered. He had as many layers of clothing on as he could while still being able to move. It would be so easy. Smack one or two around, make them see sense that way. Beat it into them.
“Maybe we ain’t feeling like reasoning with you, arsehole!” the farmer snapped. He was clutching his sickle so hard that his knuckles were white. And his hands were trembling, ever so slightly.
He’s scared of me. For the faintest instant, he saw himself as the villager saw him: a gaunt man, armed to the teeth, whose eyes could set alight with evil flame at will. A man who surrounded himself with monsters, and whose word was law to them. And he held these people’s lives in his hands.
“Do you wish for us to web them down, my Lord?” one of the spider warriors asked hopefully. “A bite or two, perhaps, and they won’t struggle for a long while.”
“No,” Ed said, feeling the anger draining out of him. “Not yet. We won’t be the ones throwing the first punch.”
The farmer tightened his grip on the sickle and took a tentative step forward, past Ed’s knife. The spiders hissed at him, and he stopped. He looked back.
“Go on!” the woman edged him on. “Don’t be a coward! Everyone has your back!”
“Like we had their back?” the farmer asked her, pointing at the ten webbed villagers with his sickle.
The tension was so thick that Ed could’ve cut it with his short sword. Maybe he would need to.
Then an excited laugh erupted behind him. “Lord Wright, it seems like your villagers’ insurrection has been cut short,” said Kaga. His gaze was past Ed, toward the line of trees, up and past the valley.
The kaftar had drawn his scimitar. He craned his neck one way and the other and stretched.
“What are you talking about?” Ed asked. Something in Kaga’s attitude made him forget all about the escape attempt. He followed the kaftar’s gaze.
“What’s going on?” Fearful whispers spread among the villagers like wildfire. The pleading from their webbed friends increased in urgency.
At first, Ed saw nothing, only the shadows of the forest as nightfall approached. The sway of the wind on the leaves and branches, the faint howling of a distant wolf.
“We have company,” Kaga said simply.
Then Ed saw them. Shadows, he thought at first, a mirage of the moonlight over the sea of grass. But the way those shadows floated, their shape—they were human silhouettes. There were so many of them. Floating a few feet from the ground, heading in the Haunt’s direction, arms outstretched, a grim howl oozing from their invisible mouths. There was no need to read their stats to know what they were.
“Specters!” someone screamed.
“ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS?” Pris asked, as Katalyn shoved the Diviner in her direction. The man didn’t fight back—she could’ve poked him with a hot coal and he wouldn’t have cared.
“As sure as I can be” Katalyn said. What kind of question is that? It wasn’t an easy decision to make. “Get him out of here, get the Guild, have them deal with the Watch.”
She turned her back on her friend before her nerves could fail her. She could see the faint glow of the Portal, growing ever weaker. It’d close soon. She took a step in that direction.
“Kat!” Pris called. The Thief’s face was covered in shadows. “I barely even recognize you,” she said. “The Katalyn I knew would’ve never run head-first into danger—this is heroic behavior!” There was a note of horror in her voice. “What happened to you?”
I didn’t wish it to be this way, Katalyn thought. Then some asshole raised my prick of a father into an undead monster. “No one gave me a choice,” she said aloud. “Now get the fuck out of here—heroics are contagious, you know.”
Pris paled and caught Manfred by the wrist. Outside, the sky had gone dark—everyone knew the undead were stronger at night. “Good luck, Kat.”
Sure, why not? Katalyn thought. She’d need luck. The Portal waited for her, and past it, who knew? Probably Nicolai and his cult wa
iting in ambush, or she’d appear right in reach of Torst’s draining aura, too close for any escape. Even if she survived the first few seconds, there was little she could do against the wraith.
The memory of that unavoidable fear she’d felt, the effects the wraith’s aura had had on her, it almost made her turn back at the last second. That, more than anything else, was what propelled her forward with the last step.
If she ran now, she’d live with that fear forever. It’d become real.
She crossed the Portal. Reality shifted. For a tiny fraction of a second, she was nowhere at all, the darkness between worlds, empty except for a mountain in the distance, glowing veins of red lava flowing all around and through it. She caught a hint of small, pink stones flowing through the red currents…
Then it was an empty clearing, surrounded by a circle of trees. The air was cold—freezing, even. The memory of the laughing mountain left her mind completely, becoming less than a bad dream. There was only the forest, the howling of distant wolves, and a path of dead vegetation spreading in a line from the Portal and into the forest.
“Torst,” she said aloud. She checked her dagger and made sure her weapons were still there. “I guess it’s time for a family reunion, after all.”
23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SHADOWS OF HOIA
“Specters,” Bryne said. His sickle lay forgotten on the ground. “They are a wraith’s summons…” He looked around, panic settling in his eyes. “Here, in the middle of nowhere? How can this be…”
Torst, Ed thought, as panic threatened to drown his brain. He—it—is here. And if the wraith was here… Nicolai. Where?
“Run!” one of the farmers screamed. “A wraith’s nearby! Every man for himself!”
“NO!” Ed turned to the voice’s direction and pointed at it. He realized that, at some point, he had drawn his short sword. “Everyone, cut your friends free. Get them inside the Haunt!”
“Inside the dungeon?” another villager said. “We should run for Undercity!”
In this cold? In the dead of the night? “Listen up!” Ed said. His Evil Eye flared again. “You can do whatever you want. I won’t stop you. Run, if you wish. But you’ll be running into the dark, and you know what may be lurking out there.” He pointed his sword at the incoming specters. “The dungeon is well defended. Kes is there, as are the rest of my minions. Out here—” he encircled the line of undead with the tip of his sword “—they can strike at you from anywhere. Your call!”
Without looking to see if his words had convinced them, he ran for the spider warriors. “I need one of you to warn everyone.”
“I am the fastest,” said Tulip immediately. “What should I say?”
If Ed had had a day to prepare, he could’ve spent it giving instructions. Right now, his mind worked in overdrive. Every shadow could be an ambush, every tiny rock could be a hiding spot from where Nicolai could spring. One thing at a time, he urged himself. A million years ago, when he was an MMO player, he had realized that a successful raiding party depended on their leaders keeping calm under ever-increasing pressure.
He never suspected it was this hard in real life—he’d had no reason to. His heart pumped blood so hard that he could feel his veins jumping under his skin. “Tell Kes to expect an attack, have her coordinate the defenses. She’ll know what to do. The others should get all our undead-killing tricks ready. Spread them around the dungeon and send whatever we can spare my way.”
“I saw Kessih’s stats sheet,” Kaga told Ed, who by now had forgotten all about the kaftar. “She’s your best warrior. You want her here, with us.”
“I want her defending my people,” Ed snapped back. There was no time for a tactical discussion. “Those things can get through walls. Out here, in the open, we have a chance against them,” Ed said quickly, as the spider darted off toward the Haunt. “But the man who summoned the wraith isn’t an idiot. He knows that and sent them out in the open anyway!”
“So it’s a trap,” said Kaga without looking at Ed, because the kaftar wouldn’t take his eyes off of the specters. Their howling was growing louder with every second. Less than a minute and the first wave would reach them. “Pull back, Dungeon Lord. Open ground is no place for you. Let your minions handle this.”
Ed risked a glance over his shoulder. Most of the villagers were working to free the ones trapped by the webs, frantically trying to cut them loose. If Ed pulled back now, or if the three spiders and the lone kaftar fell to the specters…
“My place is here,” Ed said. It was strange. He wasn’t scared anymore. Just anxious—and excited. He wondered if his body could pump enough adrenaline to make him overdose.
It was simple. The villagers needed time to run, the Haunt needed time to prepare. He would get them that time.
“Hah!” Kaga cackled with approval, and his scimitar danced in his hand. For a second, Ed felt connected to the strange kaftar—they both were feeling the same urges. “It isn’t in me to deny a man the chance to die bravely in battle. Pact with me, Dungeon Lord! My gut tells me we’ll need all the advantages we can get.”
“Agreed.” Ed rattled off his conditions—which weren’t many—through gritted teeth. That inhumane humming! Behind him, a few of the villagers wailed with terror. The first three specters floated in range of Ed and the others, more—so many more—following after them.
A dark mist erupted out of Ed’s chest, waded through the air like a serpent, and traced a circle around him and the kaftar. A lone tendril of smoke reached Kaga’s heart and connected him to Ed.
“For the cluster!” the three spider warriors screeched. “For the Queen! For the Haunt!” Strands of web hit the closest specter in the chest, went halfway through, smudged its transparent insides, and slowed it down.
Kaga dashed toward the specter. The fang dagger surged up through the air, passed between the specter’s extended arms, and neatly bisected it, like parting a cloud. The specter’s body lost cohesion, smoke carried away by the wind, and the webbing fell to the ground. Nothing was left behind.
The two specters darted to Kaga, and Ed jumped in the way of the closest one. He jabbed at it with his short sword, and the steel went clear through its chest—doing no damage. The specter thrashed at him with its arms. Ed stepped away, barely, but a transparent fingertip reached his shoulder.
He felt a surge of electricity spread through his body. Shit! Cold and numbness, coming from the tiny spot where the creature had touched him. Endurance drainers, then, by touch, and invulnerable to normal weaponry.
That had a solution. “Eldritch edge!” Ed called out, and his sword burst into dark green flames right—just as the specter closed in for another strike. The flaming blade crashed against the undead’s skull, splitting it in half. There was a flash of arcane overload and the shade exploded.
Two triumphant cries pierced the night. One was from Kaga. Ed realized the other was coming from himself. He darted through the still-dissipating smoke. The kaftar had already dispatched the third specter. The first round was theirs.
And now they were surrounded. The undead song pierced Ed’s ears, closer and closer, as dozens of black hands extended in his direction.
IT WASN’T one of Katalyn’s best days. Her dagger neatly pierced the neck of the nearest specter—and did nothing to it.
“Oh, come on!” She jumped back, arcing her back to avoid the draining touch of the specter. She had to activate her advanced dodge and her feline acrobatics at the same time right afterward because three new specters surged through the trees—past the wide trunks like they were but illusions—and reached out for her.
She vaulted past their heads, well beyond the normal jumping range of a non-talent-assisted human, stepped neatly on the trunk’s surface, and propelled herself past the specters, adjusting her direction halfway through the air by planting a hand on the ground and pivoting on it.
Simply put, it wasn’t fair. Under normal circumstances, a specter would’ve been abo
ut as dangerous as a zombie. Their stats were pathetic, mere necromantic emanations, residues from the wraith’s feeding. But I can’t fucking touch them!
None of her many weapons were enchanted. Sure, she was pissed about it now, but she had never, in her entire career, needed an enchanted weapon until tonight. Enchanted weapons were for assholes who couldn’t defend themselves without assistance, the same way an amateur Thief might buy a lockpicking talent instead of learning the hard way.
Her alert talent blared a warning, and she darted to the left without looking. A specter had crept up behind her, through a small hill, and missed her neck by a hair-breadth. I can barely see them, Katalyn recognized. Even with the moonlight above, the shadows of the trees were enough to turn them invisible.
“So I can’t hurt them, and I’ve got no idea what I’ll do when I find Torst,” she muttered through gritted teeth. It was time to get reinforcements.
The only problem was finding them—the forest looked the same to her, and Ed hadn’t told her where the Haunt was located. She turned her back on the oncoming specters and ran toward the forest, in the direction where she had first found them. Her reasoning was simple: the direction with the most enemies had to be the correct one.
Thorny bushes and branches scraped her arms, legs, and face as she ran, but she paid them no mind. Her talents saved her from stumbling over rocks and other unseen obstacles many times over. The specters gave chase with surprising agility—they had no need to dodge any obstacle, they simply went through.
With any luck, she’d find Ed and the others at the most dangerous spot, and she’d improvise from there.
Instead, as she reached the crest of a steep slope, she discovered a deadened area below about ten strides in diameter. The wraith floated a few feet above the withering vegetation, its empty sockets turning to Katalyn, the smoldering green points of light inside them glowing brighter for an instant as it recognized her.